of
ornithological systems, who ransack the world for specimens, and who
have no doubt that the chief end of a bird is to be named and
catalogued,--the more synonyms the better. Somewhere between these two
extremes comes the person whose interest in birds is friendly rather
than scientific; who has little taste for shooting, and an aversion
from dissecting; who delights in the living creatures themselves, and
counts a bird in the bush worth two in the hand. Such a person, if he is
intelligent, makes good use of the best works on ornithology; he would
not know how to get along without them; but he studies most the birds
themselves, and after a while he begins to associate them on a plan of
his own. Not that he distrusts the approximate correctness of the
received classification, or ceases to find it of daily service; but
though it were as accurate as the multiplication table, it is based (and
rightly, no doubt) on anatomical structure alone; it rates birds as
bodies, and nothing else: while to the person of whom we are speaking
birds are, first of all, souls; his interest in them is, as we say,
personal; and we are none of us in the habit of grouping our friends
according to height, or complexion, or any other physical peculiarity.

But it is not proposed in this paper to attempt a new classification of
any sort, even the most unscientific and fanciful. All I am to do is to
set down at random a few studies in such a method as I have indicated;
in short, a few studies in the temperaments of birds. Nor, in making
this attempt, am I unmindful how elusive of analysis traits of character
are, and how diverse is the impression which the same personality
produces upon different observers. In matters of this kind every
judgment is largely a question of emphasis and proportion; and,
moreover, what we find in our friends depends in great part on what we
have in ourselves. This I do not forget; and therefore I foresee that
others will discover in the birds of whom I write many things that I
miss, and perhaps will miss some things which I have treated as patent
or even conspicuous. It remains only for each to testify what he has
seen, and at the end to confess that a soul, even the soul of a bird, is
after all a mystery.

Let our first example, then, be the common black-capped titmouse, or
chickadee. He is, _par excellence_, the bird of the merry heart. There
is a notion current, to be sure, that all birds are merry; but that is
o